[MR] About that "They die Young" myth

[Craig Levin]

Eogan:

> In a private conversation I had with the late Dr. D. Gordon Teal of Teallach, 
> Baron of Huntly (mundane Baron), who was working on his PhD thesis on a small 
> medieval English town (forgive me if I can't forget which one), we discussed 
> this very topic.  A large part of his research was examining the vellum 
> sheets where the death records were kept.  These records could tell him a lot 
> about the people in the village, household possessions, general health, etc.  

Inquisitiones Post Mortem, or parish rolls? IPMs usually gave an
accounting of a person's assets and debts, so that the lord could
assess the inheritance duties on the estate. Parish rolls seem to
be the more likely items to have information on minors. Of
course, you can look at both in many places.

> BTW, he said that these death records for the village usually fit on one 
> peice of vellum per year, with maybe 10 to 20 deaths.  But when he came to 
> one year in the 14th century, andsaw an entire sheet filled with names, then 
> picked it up and found that it was sewn to another sheet, and another, and 
> yet another, etc., in accordian fashion, he realized this was the year the 
> Black Death hit that village.  He read out all of the hundreds of names, and 
> said he literally wept for all of those people.  Even though he had studied 
> the plague, it had never hit him like that before.

I can understand. One of the large-sized items in Catholic U.'s
collection is a complete digest of fifteen years' worth of
judicial sentences of the Inquisition in Coimbra, a college town
in Portugal. It's a coffee-table sized book, around five hundred
pages long, in eight point, with abbrev.'s. I'm surprised that
there's a town left today.

Pedro